The Washington Posthas a great 'condensed' time line of all the key events leading up to Avengers: Endgame. If you've lost track or missed a few episodes this will save you dozens of hours of catch up viewing. Fair warning, it might also cause you to question why you spent so much of your life invested in this crazy shit.

4 Responses to ‘Marvel timeline. (Very helpful, kind of bonkers)’

Posted May 11

I when do you think Marvel Studios realised what a franchise monster they had created, do you think it was when they said, sure make a goofy Guardians of the Galaxy movie we can take the loss and it was a mega hit? Also I really like the observation that Guardians of the Galaxy is the Australian series Farscape Marvelised. Not as amusing as the theory Guardians of the Galaxy is just the Avengers playing a RPG.

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Posted May 11

This extended timeline has Hudson Hongo over at IO9 musing on their mortality.
"I’ll be honest, events like the 2008 financial crisis have conditioned me not to plan too far ahead. At my most optimistic, I’ll entertain two- or three-year goals. But there’s something disturbingly concrete about a date like “December 2027.” It’s a date that will certainly come to pass, whether we’re all here to see it or not.

What will life be like 2027? Will there still be bees? Coral reefs? Discrete meteorological seasons the average person would recognise as “summer” and “winter”? Hard to say, but Disney is pretty sure there will be five Avatar movies.

And more importantly, what will my life be like in eight years? "

John Birmingham would have you know...

FormerlyKnownAsSimon would have you know...

the kids watched the first one yesterday. It's okay, but it does have that white man saves indigenous people vibe to it that Dances with wolves had. I also tremble at the thought of four more avatar movies to come. Because of MCU everyone is going to try and milk us all for extended story line not very good movies. I sat back and counted how much we spent on those marvel movies. Spoiler: it was a lot.

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Respond to 'Marvel timeline. (Very helpful, kind of bonkers)'

I dips me lid to Havoc for bringing this to my atention over on the Book of Face. DANGER CLOSE, a retelling of the Battle of Long Tan. Not sure how I missed it before. I cant tell if the script is any good from this clip (although I'm amused by the need for subtitles.) I think the actors and producers have done well to capture the character of the soldiers from that era. They look normal, eve a bit vintage, not like the muscle mountains of the present day.

I will be interested to see whether the Vietnamese get to be three dimensional characters or simply bullet fodder. I thought the Mel Gibson film (We Were Soliders Once, And Young) did reasonably well for a Hollywood effort on that front, even if the humanisation of the Other was all invested in one character.

2 Responses to ‘Danger Close’

Posted April 29

I know another film was made about Long Tan (haven't seen it though). I am keen to see how this one goes, and hope they don't go all 'Hollywood' with it e.g. invent American involvement, add a Love Interest,all that sort of thing. Or in other words, I hope they don't Fuck It Up.

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I took in this film on the weekend with Jane. It was good. That's really all the review you need, but this being the internet, fapping wankbadgers require I do more.

I'll fess up that I didn't know the Captain Marvel character before watching this film. I did read a long, explanatory thread on the Twitz, by the author Wesley Chu as I recall, who laid out the entire fascinating history while standing in a car park after a date.

His date abandoned him, but at least I got a great thread to read. Long story short, Captain Marvel go caught up in an IP dispute between US and UK comic publishers who finally swapped the character's gender and name to avoid a copyright suit.

Perfect. I love it.

Having no investment the canon I came at the movie without preconceptions. Honestly, I found the first Act a little confusing. But it quickly became obvious why. Brie Larson's character Carol Danvers is still discovering her own history and her imperfect memory is far from a reliable narrator. If you find yourself thinking, "What the fuck is going on here?" it's because the writers and producers WANT you to be thinking exactly that.

For fans of the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe, the main narrative sequence predates the events of last year's Infinity War by about twenty years. Larson's character, who undergoes a number of name changes as she recovers her memories and personal history (but is never once called Captain Marvel) arrives on Earth in the 1990s, literally dropping into a Blockbuster Video store. Even back then, it's looking dilapidated and I did enjoy this piece of proactive retrofuturist nostalgia.

Speaking of which, Agents Coulson and Fury are much younger and largely unknown to each other. They haven't yet gone full to Men in Black mode, and Danver's arrival is a large part of the reason why they do, and why Fury eventually sets up the Avengers Initiative.

You dont need to know the plot. There's an alien war, it spill's over here. A lot of preconceptions are set up and turned over.

My bottom line is I enjoyed it hugely. Larson really makes the story and character arc work. By the end of the movie she is effectively Superman with a double X chromosome. Seriously, she would kick the Man of Steel's shiny ass. She'll be a great addition to the roster when the Avengers return.

11 Responses to ‘Captain Marvel is good’

Posted March 11

I will not say I am surprised. You liked "Last Ship" after all, and that show is a steaming pile of garbage. Good thing your taste in entertainment does not translate to your writing. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here.

John Birmingham puts forth...

jl has opinions thus...

Posted March 12

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I take it you didn't take the kids? I'm finding that i give movies a better personal review if i watched it with the kids and they enjoyed it. If it gives them joy it notches my joy in the viewing experience up a few bars.

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Loved it. Took the daughter and she enjoyed it too (not as much as Wonder Woman, but I think that is due to more people knowing about Wonder Woman than Captain Marvel). Funny, clever, confused at first but understanding at the end. Ticked all the boxes.
And as a white, middle aged, middle to upper class, straight, married male I did not feel threatened by this film in anyway.
Also, I reckon she will be able to lift Thor's hammer in End Game. Captain America moved it, and we know what he was made from.

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Can't believe how much I'm looking forward to watching a movie about Dubya's Veep. But I am. The Big Short, by the same guy, was the just about the best explanation of the Great Recession I ever saw, read or heard. This looks even better.

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Animal House popped up on one of the streamers a few weeks ago—just checked, it was Netflix—and I started it rolling for no reason other than a quick nostalgia fix. I think I first watched that movie in Canberra when I was working for defence and sharing with a couple of other blokes, one of whom nowadays might not be a million miles removed from the office of the Secretary of the Department of Defence.We were all newly stranded in Canberra, first year out of uni, and most Saturday nights we'd get a few beers on board and rent some video tapes.That's how long ago this was.No DVDs, just tapes.I knew about Animal House of course. It'd been out for a years but was already a pop cultural touchstone. We watched it and probably watched it again before returning the tape. I rewatched it many times afterwards and retained fond if slightly hazy memories decades later.It was kind of odd going back.It was still funny in parts, but the humour felt more elegiac — funny because I recalled that it had been funny once upon a time. There was a sort of naive quality to it, which was only partly a function of setting the story in 1962 before the violent atomisation of the later Sixties. There was also something new. Real awkwardness. Not so much with the white monocultural cast. That was historically on point, although I doubt any film maker would get away with it now.

Rather, the sexual politics of Animal House feel... a little uncomfortable. There are no outright rape jokes, unlike a period 'classic' such as the original Ocean's Eleven, for instance.But jeez, there's some problematic content, as the kids might say... If the kids are into policing the boundaries of acceptable discourse.The racial inequities of the time, especially the clueless liberalism of the monied elites, are actually well neatly caught in the byplay between the Delta's and Otis Day and the Knights.But in the #MeToo era its the film's gender biases that strike a loud, discordant note. Two moments in particular; chapter president Robert Hoover's winking joke at 'taking a few liberties with their dates', and Eric Stratton's gross seduction of the hottie from Emily Dickinson College. There are more, and the movie is doubtless a pale reflection of a much darker reality... but I was struck by how differently it played now than when I first watched it all the back in the 1980s.

5 Responses to ‘The Animal House Awkward Rewatch’

I really like how functional the word 'problematic' is. It doesn't denote that anything need be done about it. It's not pushing down your throat that you need to be offended. But it also gives you permission to justifiably do so if you wish.

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Posted September 10

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The other way to talk about problematic things is to point out they would be challenging to explain to certain audiences, or that they only work if you deny some category of people have a legitimate perspective.

But Revenge of the Nerds is worse - one of its “hero” moments depicts a sequence we would now consider rape, and probably should have back when it was new. Not sure I remember myself, I remember not thinking it was particularly good but that’s about it.

Posted September 14

the endless tiring one upmanship of who can be more politically correct than everyone else, who can be more offended and outraged than everyone else. Or who can be more glib, cynical and sarcastic than everyone else. Those poor kids have removed all joy from their lives and replaced it with the politics of an outraged 15 year old.